Don Quixote tilting against windmills on the long-suffering Rosinante,
trying to save damsels in distress from imaginary ogres; or me jousting
with an exclusive environment on my battered wheelchair to try and give
people with disabilities a fighting chance. Who is crazier?

Saturday, 8 June 2013

Almost, but not quite, perfect

I
have – as you may know if you have been reading the recent posts in
my blog – been in the US for the past few weeks. And I have been
enjoying various types of freedom that have been denied me for a
while now – driving around in cars with an automatic shift which
involves no work for my left (and `game') foot, driving around
campuses and the streets of the smaller towns on a rented scooter (of
the sort praised rapturously in youtube videos by the late Rahul
Cherian), finding ramps almost wherever there were steps. In short, I
have been basking in the sort of Utopia that the underprivileged PWD
of India have been craving and campaigning for – tactile pavements
with cutaways to enable easy transition to roads, pedestrian
crossings where you can cross without running the risk of getting
killed. Will India, the allegedly largest democracy and superpower of
the future, ever get to this stage?

But
even in this allegedly greatest democracy, all is not well. At this
large plush hotel (on the Pacific coast, with swimming pools,
jacuzzis, almost anything you can think of), they had only two
accessible rooms, one of which did not have a roll-in shower and you
could only shower by climbing into a tub that necessitated getting
your legs up and across a two-foot high side. The toilets of many
houses have no grab bars, only slick marble-like tiles where taking a
sliding toss like a baseball player is an entirely likely scenario
even for the able bodied. No wonder so many 60 plus people have
broken hip bones.While our democracy continues to deny the rights of certain minorities like PWDs and Dalits, theirs does equally ridiculous things such, for instance, as a Texan court recently acquitting a person who had shot a paid escort for walking out on him without having sex with him even though he had paid her. The justification for the verdict was: Texas law allows people to use deadly force to recover property during a nighttime theft.

About Me

I am a professor of mathematics at the Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai (India). I have been increasingly mobility challenged of late due to the onset of a neurological condition known as multiple sclerosis; and perforce, I have had to notice the different ways that society excludes people like me, not deliberately, but for want of consciously thinking of the need for a more inclusive and accessible society.
Most of the posts here are a reproduction of articles from a column called `Different Strokes for Different Folks' which I wrote in the Times of India for a little more than a year from August 2011 until the powers that be decided that there were more pressing matters to be discussed on their pages.
I've written a bit more in the post 'Genesis of the Blog', which explains how this blog came into being.